My Writing Experience

I'm a cat lover, writer and artist in general.  I've told stories much of my life, but didn't start writing seriously with the thought of publishing anything until about ten years ago.  

I really got interested when my husband sent me an email about the first ABNA contest back in 2008.  I had a story I'd been working on for about four years and was determined to finish it and enter it in the contest.  It was all free, so I had nothing to lose and was looking forward to the experience.

Haversham Hill started out as a dream that I built a story around.  I'm blessed to have vivid wild dreams most of the time and although this is a ghost story, I'm never afraid when I'm dreaming.

Over the next three - four months I wrote my butt off on that story, going over it and rewriting several times. I probably read it thirty times and could tell you the whole story without even reading it.  I didn't know if I would ever be satisfied with my efforts.  I finally decided I could only tweak on it so much.  

Then of course came my lesson in formatting.  I was so frustrated with Word at that point because I had never used it much before.  I usually hand wrote on big legal pads, or in notebooks up to that point.  Typing this whole story into Word was a huge task.  I about pulled my hair out trying to learn the program in such a short period of time.  I picked my girlfriend's brain on the phone since she was in TX and I was here in the desert in southern UT.  I finally got a Word tutor at the local college to help me out.  Those were trying times, but I won't be deterred and got everything ready in time.

I did make it a few rounds in the contest before I was eliminated, so I felt good about all my hard work.  I met many wonderful talented writers and learned a lot.

When the contest was over, I did lots of research on publishing and decided to self-publish the book with Createspace, the best value I found at the time.  Now I had another problem, I needed a cover.  At the time, CS didn't have the cover creator they do today.  

This presented another big learning curve as I taught myself Photoshop.  In many ways, this was worse than learning Word, but I was determined and stubborn and eventually succeeded in making my cover.  

I had tons of photos on my computer and needed one of the woods for this book.  At that time we owned a cabin in the mountains we could escape to in the summer when it was 115 here in the desert.  The cabin was in a national forest at 6800 feet high.  This gave me an opportunity to take lots of woodsy pics.  

A couple of stressful months later I had everything ready and uploaded my files.  Then I anxiously awaited the proof copy, which arrived surprisingly fast.  I sat down to read it like a book for the first time.  This proof was free for entering the contest, but to my horror I found a missing period and a missing set of quotation marks.  I couldn't let that slide, so I had to fix it and upload a new file, then wait for another proof copy.  

Finally book one was ready.  Since I can't spend any money on my writing projects, I'm not sure how I came up with the cash to buy these books, but I was so excited when they arrived.  I really felt a sense of accomplishment.

The wonderful feeling of holding your first book

This is my first book and still my best seller.  I think it's because it's a ghost story.  Looking at it now, I would probably have done a few things differently if I was doing it today.

 

By this time I was working on book two, another fantasy, but this time a medieval, romance adventure story.  I've always loved the tales of King Arthur and reading about the Middle Ages.  So I set my story in a small hamlet and decided to take two sisters that would be separated and left as orphans after raiders killed their parents.

The story took about a year and a half to write.  I had to do a lot of research for that time period in order to get things as accurate as possible.  

When I was finished, I found another writer on the internet to exchange books with and he read my work for errors.  This is the book I entered in the ABNA the following year.  I made it a couple of rounds with this one also.  

When the contest was over I designed a cover by setting up my own back drop here at the house and taking about fifty pictures to get the right one that I envisioned in my mind.  This time Word and Photoshop wasn't as hard to work with.

I also published this book with CS and have plans to make it a sequel someday in the future, although it can stand alone as a book.

While this book was in the contest, I started on my next novel, again inspired by another dream.  

 

My third book is a Y/A adventure story about a twelve-year-old boy who meets a leprechaun.  He's an adventurous kid and this was fun to write.  I set this book in Ireland and the lad is a bored potato farmer's son.

Yes, this was another ABNA entry.  I can't seem to stay away from that contest.

I received a Wacom tablet for Christmas the year I was writing this book so I used it along with Photoshop to design my cover. I had a lot of fun doing that because I love to draw, but painting in pixels is a whole new game.  

Saving the Rainbow isn't a big seller.  I think the story has a nice message, but I have some Irish speak in it to make it more authentic.  Maybe I overdid it.

Here's my table at the book faire

I did do a book faire where I live, but they shun fantasy authors here.  The community is a very religious one.  I'll never do another book faire here, but I don't regret doing this one.  It proved to me what I already knew.

During all this, I also wrote and finished a family book of farm stories during the years we were all growing up in south TX. This was a ten-year project and I decided to print and bind it myself and not make it available through Amazon.

I've now taken a different path for a while and have written my first mystery, which is being edited right now.  Meanwhile, I'm almost finished with the sequel.  I have a cover in my head for this book, but don't have one available yet to post.  I'm not sure if it will be published this year or not.  I hope so.

You can find out more about my books on my writing blog Faerie Book Loft or on my website Faerie Mound Books.

Thanks for reading.